by S. U. Pacat
‘I’ll stay,’ said Damen. ‘You know I’ll stay for as long as you—’
‘Don’t,’ said Laurent. ‘Don’t lie to me. Not you.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Damen. ‘Three days. After that, I ride south.’
Laurent nodded. After a moment, Damen came back to rest against the table beside Laurent. He watched Laurent find his way back to himself.
Eventually, Laurent began to talk, the words precise and quite steady.
‘You’re right. I killed Nicaise when I left it half done. I should have either stayed away from him, or broken his faith in my uncle. I didn’t plan it out, I left it to chance. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking about him like that. I just . . . I just liked him.’ Underneath the cold, analytical words, there was also something bewildered.
It was awful. ‘I should never have—said that. Nicaise made a choice. He spoke up for you because you were his friend, and that is not something you should regret.’
‘He spoke up for me because he didn’t think my uncle would hurt him. None of them do. They think he loves them. It has the outward semblance of love. At first. But it isn’t love. It’s . . . fetish. It doesn’t outlast adolescence. The boys themselves are disposable.’ Laurent’s voice didn’t change. ‘He knew that much, deep down. He always was smarter than the others. He knew that when he got too old, he would be replaced.’
‘Like Aimeric,’ said Damen.
Into the long silence that stretched out between them, Laurent said: ‘Like Aimeric.’
Damen recalled Nicaise’s blistering verbal attacks. He looked at Laurent’s clear profile and tried to understand the strange affinity between man and boy.
‘You liked him.’
‘My uncle cultivated the worst in him. He still had good instincts sometimes. When children are moulded that young, it takes time to undo. I thought . . .’
Softly, ‘You thought you could help him.’
He watched Laurent’s face, the flickering of some internal truth behind the careful lack of all expression.
‘He was on my side,’ said Laurent. ‘But in the end, the only person on his side was him.’
Damen knew better than to reach out, or to try to touch him. The tiled floor around the table was scattered with detritus: overturned pewter, an apple rolled to a far tile, a pitcher of wine that had let fly its contents so that the floor was soaked in red. The silence stretched out.
It was with a shock that he felt the touch of Laurent’s fingers against the back of his wrist. He thought it a gesture of comfort, a caress, and then he realised that Laurent was shifting the fabric of his sleeve, sliding it back slightly to reveal the gold underneath, until the wrist-cuff he had asked the blacksmith to leave on was exposed between them.
‘Sentiment?’ said Laurent.
‘Something like that.’
Their eyes met and he could feel each beat of his heart. A few seconds of silence, a space that lengthened, until Laurent spoke.
‘You should give me the other.’
Damen flushed slowly, heat spreading from his chest over his skin, his heartbeats intrusive. He tried to answer in a normal voice.
‘I can’t imagine you’d wear it.’
‘To keep. I wouldn’t wear it,’ said Laurent, ‘though I don’t believe your imagination is having any difficulty with the idea.’
Damen let out a soft, unsteady breath of laughter, because he was right. For a while they sat together in comfortable silence. Laurent had mostly returned to himself, his posture more casual, his weight leaned back on his arms, watching Damen as he sometimes did. But he was a new version of himself, stripped back, youthful, a little quieter, and Damen realised he was seeing Laurent with his defences lowered—one or two of them, anyway. There was an untried, fragile feeling to the experience.
‘I should not have told you in the manner I did about Kastor.’ The words were quiet.
Red wine was seeping into the tiles of the floor. He heard himself ask it.
‘Did you mean what you said? That you were glad.’
‘Yes,’ said Laurent. ‘They killed my family.’
His fingers dug into the wood of the table. The truth was so close in this room that it seemed for a moment that he would say it, say his own name to Laurent, and the closeness of it seemed to press down on him, because they had both lost family.
He thought, it was what had linked Laurent and the Regent together at Marlas: they had both lost an older brother.
But it was the Regent who had forged alliances across the border. It was the Regent who had given Kastor the support he needed to destabilise the Akielon throne. And so Theomedes was dead, and Damianos had been sent to . . .
The idea, when it came, seemed to spool the ground out from beneath his feet, changing the configuration of everything.
It had never made sense that Kastor had kept him alive. Kastor had been so careful to obliterate every piece of evidence of his treachery. He had ordered all of the witnesses killed, from slaves to men of high rank like Adrastus. Leaving Damen alive was mad, dangerous. There was always the possibility that Damen would escape and return to challenge Kastor for the throne.
But Kastor had made an alliance with the Regent. And in exchange for troops, he had given the Regent slaves.
One slave in particular. Damen felt hot, then cold. Could it be that he had been the Regent’s price? That in exchange for troops, the Regent had said, I want Damianos sent as a bed slave to my nephew?
Because throw Laurent together with Damianos, and either one would kill the other, or, if Damen kept his identity concealed and they somehow managed to form an alliance . . . if he helped Laurent instead of hurting him, and Laurent, out of the deep-buried sense of fairness that existed within him, helped him in turn . . . if the foundation of trust was built between them so that they might become friends, or more than friends . . . if Laurent ever decided to make use of his bed slave . . .
He thought about the Regent’s suggestions to him, sly, subtle. Laurent could benefit from a steadying influence, someone close to him with his best interests at heart. A man with sound judgement, who could help guide him without being swayed. And the constant, pervasive insinuation: Have you taken my nephew?
My uncle knows that when I lose control, I make mistakes. It would have given him a perverse kind of pleasure to send Aimeric to work against me, Laurent had said.
How much greater the twisted pleasure to be gleaned from this?
‘I’ve listened to everything that you said to me,’ Laurent was saying. ‘I’m not going to rush off to Charcy with an army. But I still want to fight. Not because my uncle threw down a challenge, but on my own terms, because this is my country. I know that together we can find a way to use Charcy to my advantage. Together we can do what we cannot do apart.’
It had never really had the stamp of Kastor. Kastor was capable of anger, of brutality, but his actions were straightforward. This kind of imaginative cruelty belonged to someone else.
‘My uncle plans everything,’ said Laurent, as though reading Damen’s thoughts. ‘He plans for victory and he plans for defeat. It was you who never quite fit . . . You’ve always been outside of his schemes. For everything that my uncle and Kastor planned,’ said Laurent, as Damen felt himself grow cold, ‘they had no idea what they did when they gifted me with you.’
Outside, when he pushed outside, he heard the sound of men’s voices, and the chink of bridles and spurs, the rattle of wheels on stone. He was breathing unsteadily. He put a hand on the wall to take some of his weight.
In a fort full of activity, he knew himself a game piece, and was only beginning to be able to glimpse the scope of the board.
The Regent had done this, and yet he had done this too, he also was responsible. Jord was right. He had owed Laurent the truth, and he hadn’t given it to him. And now he knew what the consequences of that choice might be. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to regret what they had done: last night had been bright in a way that resist
ed tarnishing.
It had been right. His heart beat with the feeling that the other truth must somehow change to make it right, and he knew that it wouldn’t.
He imagined himself nineteen again, knowing then what he knew now, and he wondered if he would have let that long-ago battle fall to the Veretians—let Auguste live. If he would have ignored his father’s call to arms altogether, and instead found his way to the Veretian tents and sought out Auguste to find some common ground. Laurent would have been thirteen but in Damen’s mind’s eye he would have found him a little older, sixteen or seventeen, old enough that Damen’s nineteen-year-old self could have begun, with all the exuberance of youth, to court him.
He could do none of that. But if there was something that Laurent wanted, he could give it to him. He could deal the Regent a blow from which he wouldn’t recover.
If the Regent wanted Damianos of Akielos standing alongside his nephew, he would get him. And if he couldn’t give Laurent the truth, he could use everything else he had to give Laurent a definitive victory in the south.
He was going to make these three days count.
The blue-eyed self-control was firmly back in place when Laurent came out onto the courtyard dais, armed and armoured and ready to ride.
In the courtyard, Laurent’s men were mounted and waiting for him. Damen looked at the hundred and twenty riders, the men he’d ridden with from the palace to the border, the men he’d worked alongside and shared bread and wine with in the evenings by the campfires. There were some notable absences. Orlant. Aimeric. Jord.
The plan had taken shape over a map. He’d put it to Laurent simply. ‘Look at Charcy’s location. Fortaine will be the launching point for troops. Charcy will be Guion’s fight.’
‘Guion and all his other sons,’ Laurent had said.
‘The strongest move you can make right now is to take Fortaine. It will give you full control of the south. With Ravenel, Fortaine and Acquitart you’ll hold Vere’s southern trade routes to Akielos as well as to Patras. You already hold the southern routes to Vask, and Fortaine gives you access to a port. You’ll have everything you need to launch a northern campaign.’
There had been a silence, until Laurent had said, ‘You were right. I haven’t been thinking about it like this.’
‘Like what?’ said Damen.
‘Like war,’ said Laurent.
Now they faced one another on the dais and words rose to Damen’s lips, personal words.
But what he said was, ‘Are you sure you want to leave your enemy in charge of your fort?’
‘Yes,’ said Laurent.
They gazed at one another. It was a public goodbye, in full view of the men. Laurent extended his hand. He did it not, as a prince might, for Damen to kneel and kiss, but as a friend. There was acknowledgement in the gesture, and as Damen took his hand, in front of the men, Laurent held his gaze.
Laurent said, ‘Take care of my fort, Commander.’
In public, there was nothing he could say. He felt his grip tighten slightly. He thought of stepping forward, of taking Laurent’s head in his hands. And then he thought of what he was, and all he now knew. And he forced himself to release his grip.
Laurent was nodding to his attendant, mounting his horse. Damen said, ‘A lot depends on timing. We have a rendezvous in two days. I—Don’t be late.’
‘Trust me,’ said Laurent with a single bright glance, straightening his horse out with the tug of a rein in the moment before the order was called, and he and his men moved out.
The fort without Laurent felt hollowed out. But, manned by a skeleton force, it still had enough men to repel any serious threat from outside. The walls of Ravenel had stood strong for two hundred years. Besides which, their plan relied on splitting their forces, with Laurent leaving first, while Damen remained, waiting for Laurent’s reinforcements and then launching from Ravenel a day later.
Because it was not possible, no matter what was said, to completely trust Laurent, the morning was a thin skein of tension, drawn tight. The men prepared in true southern weather. The blue sky, high-flung, was uninterrupted except where it was cut by a crenellation.
Damen rose to the battlements. The view stretched over hills to the horizon. Set wide in broad daylight, the landscape was empty of troops, and he marvelled again that they had been able to take this fort without the spilt blood and churned earth of a siege.
It felt good to look out over what they had accomplished and to know it was only the beginning. The Regent had held ascendancy for too long. Fortaine was going to fall, and Laurent was going to hold the south.
And then he saw the haze on the horizon.
Red. Darkening red. And then, streaming across the landscape, six riders, drawing ahead of the oncoming red at a gallop—their own scouts, pounding back to the fort.
It played out in miniature below him, the army still far enough away that their approach was silent, the scouts just points at the ends of six lines converging on the fort.
Red had always been the colour of the Regency, but that was not what changed the beating of Damen’s heart, even before the far-off sound of the horn—ivory that struck the air, splitting it open.
They marched, a line of red cloaks in perfect formation, and Damen’s heart was pounding. He knew them. He remembered the last time he had seen them, his body pressed out of sight behind outcrops of granite. He had ridden for hours along a river to avoid them, Laurent dripping in the saddle behind him. The nearest Akielon troop is nearer than I expected, Laurent had said.
These were not the Regent’s troops.
This was the army of Nikandros, the Kyros of Delpha, and his Commander, Makedon.
A burst of activity in the courtyard, the clatter of hooves, voices raised in alarm—
Damen was aware of it as if from a distance, he turned almost blindly as a runner came bursting up the stairs, taking them two at a time, throwing himself down onto one knee in front of Damen and gasping out his message.
‘Akielons are marching on us,’ he expected the runner to say, and he did, but then he said, ‘I’m to give this to the fort Commander,’ and he was urgently pressing something into Damen’s hand.
Damen stared at it. Behind him, the Akielon army was approaching. In his hand was a hard loop of metal set with a carved gemstone, the etching a starburst.
He was looking at Laurent’s signet ring.
He felt the hair rise all over his body. The last time he had seen this ring, he’d been at an inn at Nesson, and Laurent had given it over to a messenger. Give him this, and tell him that I will wait for him at Ravenel, he’d said.
Distantly he was aware that Guymar was on the battlement with a contingent of men, that Guymar was addressing him, telling him, ‘Commander, Akielons are marching on the fort.’
He turned to face Guymar, his fist closing over the signet ring. Guymar seemed to stop and realise who it was he was talking to. Damen saw it written on Guymar’s face: an Akielon force massing outside, and an Akielon in command of the fort.
Guymar pushed past his hesitation, said, ‘Our walls can withstand anything, but they’ll block the arrival of our reinforcements.’
He remembered the night Laurent had addressed him in Akielon for the first time, remembered long nights speaking in Akielon, Laurent shoring up his vocabulary, improving his fluency, and his choice of subject matter—border geography, treaties, troop movements.
He said it as it opened up inside him, ‘They are our reinforcements.’
The truth was marching towards him. His past was coming to Ravenel, a steady, unstoppable approach. Damen and Damianos. And Jord was right. There had only ever been one of him.
He said, ‘Open the gates.’
The Akielon march into the fort was the flow of a single red stream, except that whereas water swirled and swelled, it was straight and unyielding.
Their arms and legs were crudely bare, as if war was an act of flesh impacting on flesh. Their weapons were unadorned, as if they h
ad brought only the essentials required for killing. Rows and rows of them, laid out with mathematical precision. The discipline of feet marching in unison was a display of power, and violence, and strength.
Damen stood on the dais and watched the full sweep of it. Had they always been like this? So stripped of everything but the utilitarian? So hungry for war?
The men and women of Ravenel were crammed in at the edges of the courtyard, and Damen’s men were deployed to keep them back. The crowd pressed and swelled at them. Word of the Akielon entry had spread. The crowd was murmuring, the soldiers were displeased with their duty. The Regent had been right, people were saying: Laurent had been in league with Akielos all along. It was a strange kind of madness to realise that this, in fact, was true.
Damen saw the faces of the Veretian men and women, saw arrows trained down from the battlements, and in one of the corners of the vast courtyard, a woman held her son where he clutched at her leg, her hand encircling his head.
He knew what was in their eyes, visible now beneath the hostility. It was terror.
He could feel the tension of the Akielon forces too, knew they were expecting treachery. The first sword drawn, the first arrow loosed, would unleash a killing force.
A strident horn blast hit the ears, too loud in the courtyard. Echoing from every stone surface, it was the signal to cease march. The halt was sudden. It left a silence in the space where the sounds of metal had been, the tramp of feet. The horn blast was fading, until you could almost hear the sound of a bowstring being drawn tight.
‘This is wrong,’ said Guymar, his hand tight on his sword hilt. ‘We should—’
Damen held out his hand in a repressive gesture.
Because an Akielon man was dismounting from his horse, beneath the main standard, and Damen’s heart was pounding. He felt himself move forward, he was coming down the shallow steps of the dais, leaving Guymar and the others behind him.
